These are the scenarios tested in which they have concluded that the myth depicts any of the following: (1) a reasonable situation which could very easily happen by accident, (2) an urban legend that is easily replicable (though not always recommended) and/or (3) a situation whose real-life occurrence (however unlikely) has been documented through credible eye-witness or video evidence.

Backwards-Firing Gun: A rifle with a bent barrel can still fire, and the resulting bullet is slightly slower but retains more than enough momentum to be lethal. The Mythbusters bent a barrel to the comical extreme of 180 degrees and created a rifle that could potentially kill its holder.

Bedsheet Ladder: While actually climbing it is not that easy, a makeshift ladder of standard prison bedsheets is strong enough to work. Oddly enough, they also tested whether toilet paper or human hair could be used instead, and both of those proved plausible (albeit requiring impractically large quantities of the materials).

Blind Driving: A blind man can drive competently when a navigator is beside him giving directions. It works best when the blind driver has always been blind and doesn't have to adjust from normal sighted driving. And, of course, the navigator should be sober too. Even so, Don't Try This at Home.

Buxom Is Better: Working as a barista, Kari earned 30-40% more tips from both genders when she wore extra-large fake breasts, as compared with both her normal bust and when she bound them (incidentally, both smaller sizes brought in exactly the same amount).

Chainsaw Good: In the revisit of the Gun vs. Axe Zombie Apocalypse scenario, Adam decided to throw a chainsaw into the mix to see how it compared. After rigging up a replica that wouldn't hurt the volunteers, they found that it performed far better than either the axe or gun, and was the only weapon that allowed its user to survive the zombie horde.

Damn You, Muscle Memory!: The Search contestants were given bicycles engineered to have reverse steering.note Technically, they were given bike kits that they had to assemble themselves, but that's beside the point. All of them were so used to normal steering that they failed to ride the required 12-foot distance.

Delicious Distraction: You can distract an Angry Guard Dog with a steak. Kari was able to walk in an enclosure, open a safe, take what was inside, and probably would have made it out if Tory didn't throw the steak inside (or if Tory had had another steak ready when the dog came back to him). They did advise against viewers repeating the stunt shortly afterward as dogs can be trained to ignore this sort of thing.

They later tried this again with a literal Red Herring, and it distracted a bloodhound enough to throw it off a trail. However, the delay was only temporary; the dog's handler brought him quickly back on task and they were able to pick up the trail again.

Distracted by the Sexy: Urine from a female dog in heat works wonders on an Angry Guard Dog — provided it is an intact male. Similarly, the presence of a female dog in heat proved sufficiently distracting to a male sniffer dog, although the dog's handler pointed out that the other dog would have been removed from the area as part of their standard search procedures. This trope doesn't work quite so well on humans, however. A task requiring concentration was actually performed faster on average in the presence of the opposite sex than in the presence of someone of the same sex.

Driving into a Truck: Both driving up into and down out of a truck, Knight Rider-style, proved to be easier than they thought since the car's inertia helps smooth out the transition.

Duct Tape for Everything: Three episodes to date devoted entirely to what they could do with duct tape, plus pieces of other episodes, with a comment from Jamie that they could do an entire season based on duct tape alone. So far, they've managed to lift a car, seal a potato cannon, provide backing for a steel cannon, build an entire black powder cannon, tape Adam to a board using just twenty pieces, plug a boat leak (but only dry, since taking on water would prevent the adhesive from working), build a boat (in that they made sheet layers of it and then formed it around a frame for the boat cover and sail), make a bridge, repair a heavily damaged car, repair an airplane, and also stop a car from moving by duct-taping it to a telephone pole. In the third episode, they used duct tape as a tool for survival on a (not actually) deserted island. They made clothing (sandals, and a sun hat for Adam), made containers for water, created a giant SOS, used it to get/carry food and water, created shelter and beds/hammocks (as well as a few other amenities), and ultimately built a canoe with an outrigger that survived seven hours on the ocean without leaks, including breakers near the shore. They also tried to stop a car traveling at 60 miles per hour with a duct tape barrier, but that was busted. The original myth called for just a single roll of duct tape, but even when they ramped it up to around a hundred rolls, the barrier still would not hold.

Edible Ammunition: Certain varieties of cheese are hard enough to be shot out of a cannon and puncture canvas ship sails. There's actually historical precedent for this; specifically, in the 1840s, the Uruguayan Navy ran out of ammunition while defending Argentina. Instead of surrendering, they simply loaded the cannons with stale Edam cheeses — and won!

Electrified Bathtub: Yep, you can electrocute someone by dropping an appliance into the tub. The iron provided the highest amperage at the heart, at 32 milliamps. There was an extra big Don't Try This at Home warning on that one (it is a common suicide method, after all), although they also found that most modern electronics have failsafes against this sort of thing (as demonstrated with a hairdryer). Still, it's not a good thing to try to replicate.

Fixed Forward-Facing Weapon: Adam tested this on a car and found it surprisingly effective, being able to aim with the steering (left to right) and with the brakes (up and down).

Get a Hold of Yourself, Man!: A hard slap will help get one's mental faculties back on track, but only if the person is tired, stressed out, or drunk. It's not recommended if one is suffering a more serious condition.

Glass-Shattering Sound: It takes a bit of doing and perhaps a bit of fiddling with the sound equipment, but it is possible for an amplified human voice to shatter glass. A trained singer can actually do it unamplified, but the glass needs to be very close to the mouth for maximum effect.

Guns Are Worthless: In addition to the the "Busted" rating of Never Bring a Knife to a Gun Fight, they confirmed that in a Zombie Apocalypse or other situation where you are facing a large number of foes at short range, a melee weapon such as an ax is significantly more effective, even for an untrained user trying not to actually hurt anyone with the wooden handle of their foam ax.note On the other hand, the test as performed involved standing in a marked-off circle and attacking targets only when they crossed into the circle, when one of the greatest advantages of a firearm is the ability to attack from range and make use of cover, which doesn't help much against zombies.

High-Up Ice-Up: "Blue Ice" can plausibly form if an airline toilet tank develops a slow leak through the fuselage — the test model built up a significant chunk which eventually broke off under its own weight — and homeowners have testified to roof damage caused by falling ice. However, it cannot be formed by dumping an airplane's toilet mid-flight, as the wind will scatter the water into tiny particles (and airplane toilets are not designed to be dumped in-flight).

Jammed Seatbelts/Trapped in a Sinking Car: Episodes "Underwater Car" and "Inverted Underwater Car" confirmed that it's very difficult to escape from a submerged vehicle. The pressure of the water outside exerts more force than the average human can from the inside, so neither the doors nor the windows can be opened. However, escape is still possible if 1. the trapped person opens the door quickly, before the car is completely submerged, 2. the person can wait until a certain amount of water has entered the car and equalized the pressure, or 3. has a specialized device designed to break glass with them, while they are underwater.

Note that Jamie and Adam actually endorsed #3 as the best option to get you out as fast as possible. The "specialized device" is actually just a commercially available hammer with a sharp point specially designed for this, and it broke the glass easily even with just regular force applied. A spring-loaded center punch (a more general tool that is sometimes sold for the purpose of breaking tempered glass) also worked well.

For the curious: the sharp point concentrates all the force you put into swinging the hammer into one spot on the glass. The center punch has a similar point. Tempered glass (as used in automobile side windows) has stress concentrations in the corners, a blow there takes much less force to shatter the window than a blow in the center.

Also, #2 can (sometimes) be an unrealistic occurrence, as the car may invert (perhaps even multiple times) as it sinks into the water, making it far more difficult to keep sufficiently calm while the car is sinking. That said, if it's too late for option #1, and #3 is impossible, option #2 can work as a last resort.

Several people learned of #2 and used it to save themselves and loved ones. One such incident was featured on an episode of MythBusters in which a mother was able to save herself and her child from drowning after the vehicle the mother was driving slid into a body of water on a snowy day.

In "Inverted Underwater Car", Adam conceded that if the car turns over as it's going in, the hope for escape is severely slashed.

Jumping on a Grenade: This Heroic Sacrifice will significantly reduce the damage to everyone else. note At least six cases are documented in which a person survived jumping on a grenade, either by using a backpack or other cover to reduce the effects of the explosives, as documented on the trope page.

Mistaken for Junkie: Poppy seed bagels or poppy seed cake will give a false positive on the cheap bought-off-the-Internet urine tests many companies use on job applicants. It doesn't even take that much; Jamie tested positive after only three bagels, certainly a reasonable amount for someone who likes poppy seed bagels to eat. (They pointed out that a full drug screen run by a trained professional can tell the difference ... but most companies won't bother with the retest.)

Monty Hall Problem: Not only did they test the mathematical paradox itself, but they also tested what the typical contestant reaction would be in such a situation. The original premise—that the contestants would generally stick with their original decision, but the advantage in this situation was to switch—was confirmed on both counts. (In fact, all the "contestants" they tested chose to stay with their original choice, and the advantage toward switching was nearly two-to-one, as would be expected.)

Pepper Sneeze: Adam tested this out to try forcing a sneeze (at the same time he was trying to prove/bust the myth about sneezing with your eyes open). He said that while it is indeed confirmed, you're also as likely to cough if you inhale pepper.

A later episode revisited this trope, but they used tobacco snuff because pepper was too unreliable to produce a sneeze.

It doesn't work so well on bloodhounds, either; despite the large quantities of pepper across the trail, the bloodhound did not sneeze.

Pocket Protector: While most cases of this trope were Busted (see below), the MythBusters did find a very few cases where something like this actually could work—for example, a well-made police badge (nickel shield, bronze star) could potentially catch a bullet that was fired into it.

Powder Trail: A powder trail can be used as a fuse to detonate a barrel of black powder. However, the speed at which it burns changes dramatically depending on how wide the trail is, ranging from an almost instantaneous flash to slower than walking speed, which makes it difficult to measure how much time you will have to get away.

The Power of Rock: Specifically, that playing music would help plants grow faster. They found that playing classical music to plants does indeed make them grow faster. But, playing death metal causes them to grow even faster than classical!

Sand Necktie: The "beach with tide rolling in" variety. Tory took over 80 minutes to dig himself out of dry sand, Grant gave up after ten minutes in wet sand, and neither were tied up. If you're buried like that and have no aid, you're dead.

Spiked Wheels: Three designs were tried, and all were effective in disabling another car. The designs from Goldfinger and The Green Hornet would not survive repeated use, though Jamie's design would.

Spy-Tux Reveal: Jamie was able to swim a fair distance in scuba gear, take it off, and look perfectly immaculate in the tuxedo he had worn underneath.

Tongue on the Flagpole: Using both Tory's tongue and a pig's, it was determined that a standard human tongue can be frozen to a cold metal pole substantially enough to risk pulling some of the epithelial and nervous tissue or even muscle off the tongue. Kari jokingly suggested that a person could free themselves by peeing on the contact point between pole and tongue. She may not have known that this is something that officials actually recommend in case of immediate emergencies, though doing it to free yourself is highly unlikely unless you assumed a very odd position before sticking your tongue on the pole.

Unorthodox Reload: Maybe not "unorthodox", but the split-second reloading shown in movies is certainly possible by an experienced enough shooter.

Variable Terminal Velocity: Skydiving, with streamlining it's possible to catch up to someone who has been falling several seconds before needing to deploy parachutes. However, it's not possible to hear each other speak while skydiving, and there's not really enough time to carry on a meaningful conversation anyway.

Weaponized Exhaust: A jumbo jet's engines overturned a taxi, a school bus, and a small plane. Not to mention that they were even tested against the TIV and Dominator. At one point they also managed to set their own shop on fire by testing a rocket engine indoors.

Women Drivers: This was tested both on a police driving course (this test was performed "blind", with the sex of the driver hidden from the scorer) and for parallel parking (ten subjects for each gender), using a 100-point scale for each.

In the first test, while there was significant overlap between individual drivers, the men scored a 79 average while the women scored a 71 average. To determine if the myth is confirmed, one would need to know the variance in score for the male and female drivers, as averages alone are of little use, but the show regarded the myth as confirmed.

In parallel parking it was deemed statistically insignificant between men and women (both genders ended up with a bit over 40 points on average and within a 1.1 point difference). Still, there were significant differences in how points were lost on that test, as men tended to be more confident and less careful, parking quickly and showing willingness to bump the surrounding cars but rarely making any major mistakes, while women were more cautious and either parked neatly and precisely or panicked and overcompensated with disastrous results.

Plausible Tropes

These are the myths that are based on a sequence of events that, however unlikely, is not impossible concerning the portions of the myth that were tested. These myths, by default, have no documentation to prove its plausibility. The term is used primarily to provide a stepping stone between a confirmed and a busted myth. Generally speaking, if the myth is "X could happen", then "Confirmed" means that they were able to exactly reproduce the scenario, and "Plausible" means that they weren't able to exactly reproduce it, but were able to come close enough that it's not a great leap that it could happen. On the other hand, if the myth is "X has happened", then "Confirmed" means that they were both able to reproduce the scenario and find supporting documentation, and "Plausible" means they were able to reproduce the scenario, but were unable to prove that it actually has happened the way the myth states.

Balloonacy: Okay, it's technically possible to lift someone in the air with helium balloons. It just takes such a ridiculous number of them that it's impossible to accomplish by accident.

Beating Lie Detectors: Grant was able to beat an MRI-based brain blood flow detector, albeit only making the operator conclude he had stolen the wrong thing (then again, they were all known to have taken one or the other, so "innocent" wasn't a viable option for the operator). Kari and Tory weren't — so they had to take a bus ride from South Carolina to San Francisco (over 3,000 miles). Tory and Grant couldn't beat the current state-of-the-art polygraph lie detectors, either via physical (poking with a pin on truth questions) or mental (thinking happy thoughts when lying) means.

Beer Goggles: A G-rated test (well, as G-rated as you can get with an alcohol myth); Jamie, Adam, and Kari rated photographs for attractiveness. While the point distribution varied, all three of them gave higher ratings when legally drunk than they did when they were merely tipsy. (Adam played this the straightest, giving higher ratings each time. Kari's results [compared to her "sober" scores] dipped sharply for "tipsy" but recovered for "drunk", and she admitted that she gave high ratings to completely different types of people when she was drunk compared to when she was sober, meaning her results fit at least the spirit of the myth.)

Bedsheet Ladder: As noted above, the toilet paper and human hair variants. They work, but they require prohibitively large quantities of the material and quite a bit of effort in order to make a rope of useful length.

Blazing Inferno Hellfire Sauce: The "so hot it melts through a metal" variation. The story of a Mexican prisoner who managed to escape by corroding window bars in his cell with nothing but salsa was declared possible, but it would take several decades. However, when Jamie used a simple electrolysis device (which could be built with radio parts or something similar), the process greatly sped up - according to calculations, this method could dissolve the bars in less than a year. (Though it has to be direct current; Adam's attempts to replicate Jamie's results with alternating current from the light in the cell did nothing but burn the salsa onto the bar.)

Cabin Fever: Though the actual stress tests were unusable due to incorrect procedure (eating/drinking before using the spit based test), Adam showed all the outward symptoms they were looking for, while Jamie only showed one: excessive sleeping.

Carpet-Rolled Corpse: One of several movie-trope methods of Disposing of a Body tested in a corpse-removal obstacle course. It worked fine, although Jamie left the feet visible when he rolled up the syndaver.

Crash Course Landing: Both Adam and Jamie pulled it off in a full scale flight simulator, with help from an expert but without help from the simulated commercial airliner's autopilot, even though they both crashed when they tried it without help. Note that the only reason this is 'Plausible' rather than 'Confirmed' is that there's A) no recorded instance of it ever happening and B) talking someone into a safe landing is not part of anyone's training.

The expert explained that many modern aircraft can essentially land themselves, but the expert failed to mention (or the footage was cut) that the airplane and the airport have to be properly equipped for an autopilot landing. Many older airports and older aircraft may not be equipped with that technology.

Disposing of a Body: Several tropes and conventions regarding the movement of corpses (including Carpet-Rolled Corpse, above) were tested. Despite the heavy weight of the corpse, they were able to move them around surprisingly easily, in part because of the ability of the hosts to move one part of the body at a time rather than the whole thing all at once.

Dive Under the Explosion: It was ruled plausible but dependent on what type of explosive is being used. It worked well against a Hollywood-style gasoline fireball, but the ANFO broke every single blast disk.

Dunking the Bomb: In Episode 216, the Build Team tested whether you could escape death by throwing a bomb about to go off in an aquarium. The explosive force was focused on the front and back as well as the top, so you would be relatively safe off to the side.

Eek, a Mouse!!: Elephants, when suddenly confronted with a small animal such as a mouse, will apparently actively avoid it. However, unlike in media, they don't run away in a frenzy, causing a deadly stampede, but rather stop in their tracks momentarily then walk around the mouse.

Eyepatch of Power: Specifically, if one wears an eye-patch over a good eye when going from a light to a dark environment, and then takes it off, the previously-covered eye will see much better in the dark, meaning there may have been pirates who wore them for this reason. (The lack of documented evidence of this actually being the case is the only thing preventing it from being Confirmed)

Gas Cylinder Rocket: The busters tested and confirmed that a gas cylinder with sufficient pressure could smash its way through a concrete wall with force, but it actually slid on the floor instead of taking off and flying.

They did get a flying gas cylinder in the Jaws special, though, when testing the climactic scene of the movie.

Get a Hold of Yourself, Man!: Independent from the confirmed results above, they tested a variation earlier where a good hard slap could sober you up. It did help a lot.

Hollywood Silencer: A silencer does reduce the noise of a gunshot, but does not produce the classic "thwip" movie sound. The average silencer only reduces the noise of a gunshot by about twenty decibels, but that still leaves the noise around 120-130 decibels. The real purpose of a silencer is to mask the noise of a gunshot, making it harder to know where it's coming from, and/or to make anyone who hears it think the noise is something else, like a door being slammed shut.

Hyperspace Arsenal: An ordinary person would be significantly hindered by being forced to carry such a large amount of equipment, but a particularly strong and athletic person (as most FPS heroes are) might be able to handle the extra equipment without being significantly encumbered (as proven when a UFC fighter ran their Doom-themed obstacle course and clocked a better time while carrying the 80-pound arsenal of gear than Adam and Jamie managed unencumbered).

Instant Convertible: Depending on the car, the truck trailer, and the angle of impact, it is possible to shear off the roof of a car and drive away in it. In fact (thanks to a brake failure), their test car was able to drive itself off of the test site, use a dirt berm as a ramp to jump a fence, and crash into an electrical right-of-way on the other side. Unfortunately, said brake failure-related crash prevented them from testing how well the car would run in this state, although the high speed footage showed that the chassis was severely bent when the roof sheared.

Latex Perfection: The mask itself, at a distance, but the illusion is broken when the person talks, of course. In addition, it requires a diversion to work. People familiar with the impersonated could notice something ("wax statue" or "stung by bee") at a much greater distance.

Leap and Fire: While it is possible to shoot accurately like that, the technique is not very practical. In real life, you would likely want to try to land on something soft, unless you want to break your arm by landing on it with all your weight.

Light and Mirrors Puzzle: It's possible to reflect sunlight into a room to light it by a series of mirrors and make it bright enough to see easily, but as the earth is constantly moving, it doesn't last long before you need to fix the entire thing.

Oil Slick: The guys found that an oil slick made it very difficult but not impossible for the pursuer to maintain control of his car. Still, if used in a real-world situation with the element of surprise it would be more likely to work.

"Open!" Says Me: Using the shoulder-ramming technique, Jamie was able to break three of the four locks installed on the test door. The only reason he didn't get the clean sweep is because the build team replaced the screws that came with Lock #4 with longer ones.note Which is usually recommended when you're installing a chain lock, just for the record.

Potty Dance: The build team came up with results all over the board, concluding that dancing around might work out, but then again, it might not and staying calm or acting normally might work better in your personal situation, because everyone's biology is different. The verdict was "whatever works, works, until it doesn't, and then you just gotta go."

Reed Snorkel: It was determined that they could breathe while underwater using this method (with a little practice) in the "Ninjas 2" episode and even use it as a blowpipe.

Rings of Death: They were able to successfully decapitate a stationary target using a razor-sharp ring, but it proved impractical on moving targets.

Scope Snipe: Plausible with Vietnam War-era scopes and armor piercing ammunition; busted with modern ones. The modern scopes have more parts in them and the glass is curved to a different degree than the older scopes, thus giving the bullet more obstacles to blast through.

They did say, however, if you can aim at the enemy's scope, you might as well take the shot—if you hit the scope, you ruin the interior mechanisms (and thus the enemy's ability to shoot back), and if you miss by just a little bit, you're just as likely to shoot him in the head.

Shoot Out the Lock: It's possible, but not with any handgun rounds. The 12-gauge slug and 30-'06 round from an M1 Garand worked pretty well. Also, the lock used was a Master model made of stacked plates. A cheaper, solid metal lock probably would have been easier to shoot out. The team were also notably protected from ricochets. (SWAT teams use shotguns to 'open' doors all the time, but they shoot the hinges and they use custom ammo optimized for the purpose.)

The locksmith they visit also pointed out that it would potentially be far more effective to shoot the bolt rather than the lock itself, but they didn't try this.

Take the Wheel: Simple cooperative driving (passenger steering while driver handles the pedals) matched their control drives. Driver and passenger trading places while the car is moving was also surprisingly easy, assuming both people involved are roughly the same height so the driver's seat doesn't need to be adjusted. However, passenger steering and driver shooting the bad guys was ruled Busted; both the driving and the shooting were much worse than the control.

Trash Landing: With the caveat that the majority of dumpsters contain items that would be uncomfortable at best (fatal at worst) to land on; in a "best case" scenario (a dumpster filled with mattress foam), Adam pulled off the jump-and-run-away perfectly.

Wall Crawl: Adam's suction-cups-and-vacuum-pumps rig got him partway up the wall of a skyscraper, though he lacked the stamina to get much further. Jamie's attempt, while it worked, was also ridiculously loud, killing any sort of stealth he might have had.

Adam: Why, Thor, the God of Thunder, is trying to enter my building!

Water Torture: The team tested the Chinese water torture on Kari while leaving Adam unrestrained as a control subject. After an hour or so, poor Kari was so rattled the team called a halt early; they declared it plausible and decided it was too dangerous to go for full confirmation.

Whip It Good: Several whip tropes were tested in the context of Indiana Jones, and all turned out plausible or better: a person can be disarmed by being whipped in the hand (though the whip expert advised that aiming for the face is more effective), and a whip can be used to swing across a chasm if it gets a good enough grip. The myth that a whip crack is fast enough to break the sound barrier was outright Confirmed—in fact, this is why a whip has an audible crack (the tip produces a small sonic boom as it passes the speed of sound; on that scale, the sonic boom registers as a "crack" to the human ear).

Busted Tropes

The MythBusters criteria for "Busted" isn't "scientifically impossible", but rather "could not be replicated in the experiment devised." Some myths are about being plausible in any or all circumstances, or at least easily replicated. Thus if they find a hiccup that proves the myth to be far more difficult than claimed, it is busted all the same. Most myths have some basis in reality, but the actual logistics involved or the specific details render it busted note For example, lighting something on fire with mirrors is possible, but lighting a moving, water-soaked boat on fire with hundreds of mirrors is not. The popularity of that myth, the "Archimedes Death Ray," ended up being the most repeated myth tested on the show, with three full episodes dedicated just to that. There is also basic relative error, where the experiment done produces varied results but not significant enough to confirm the myth. Similarly, on paper something might very well be possible but could not be replicated and there is no documentation on that Million-to-One Chance of it happening. As mentioned above, any documentation immediately puts a myth in the "Confirmed" slot.

90% of Your Brain: Even at rest, over 15% of Tory's brain was in use at one time. While actively thinking, this went up to 30%. Additionally, while only part of the brain is in use at any given time, different areas of the brain are active at different times, meaning that by far most if not all of the brain sees use over the course of time and there's no significant portion of the brain going completely unused.

Arrow Catch: Ignoring the fact that this act requires split-second timing, arrows move with enough speed and force to rip the skin right off your palm and fingers. It's worth noting that the martial artist they tested it with actually did catch a few arrows — but this was out of a few dozen, showing that it's not impossible to do, just not actually practical as a defense. Also, said martial artist was catching arrows that were being shot at a fraction of their top speed, as the shooter was not putting a full draw on the bow, and he knew just where they would pass him.

The test was performed a second time with three archers at full draw firing one by one at random times. The martial artist did manage to catch an arrow, but it took dozens of attempts.

It was also noted that if you have the time to see the arrow coming at you and the reflexes to react, it would probably be more practical to just move out of the way (or deflect it with a sword) which the martial artist was fully capable of.

Ballistic Bone: Unshaped/unaltered teeth are too inaccurate to be used as pistol ammo. Teeth carved to shape will be much weaker (the hardest part of a tooth is the outer layer, and that's what you're grinding away) and probably won't survive firing. Crushed teeth replacing the shot in a shotgun shell, and pieces of bone carved into a bullet shape, did penetrate their dead-pig targets; however, their guest pathologist had no trouble picking out the bone/tooth fragments from the cadaver. Since the rationale behind using teeth or bones as firearms ammo is undetectability, this one was ruled Busted.

Banana in the Tailpipe: Shoving something in a car's tailpipe will not cause it to explode, no matter what Axel Foley or Hollywood tells you. Nor will it cause the car to stall; the blockage will simply be ejected first. (They did not test, however, what happened if the blockage wasn't cleared in this manner.)

Banana Peel: At least the slapstick movie version, in which you're guaranteed to fall. Jamie was running while blindfolded across banana peels and didn't slip. (Of course they then ramped things up enough to get both the guys landing on their butts.)

Barehanded Blade Block: You'd lose a chunk of your hand at best and probably your head, too. Possible if done by a trained martial artist using proper hand protection— i.e., metal, which defeats the purpose since it's not "bare-handed". And, as with the arrow-catch, anyone who has the reflexes to block a blade barehanded also has the reflexes to simply dodge the blade.

Blasting It out of Their Hands: Depending on the stance in which the gun is being held, the reaction time of the target, and their general reaction to the gun being hit, it's possible to disarm someone by firing at their piece, but shrapnel from the bullet is bound to cause collateral damage. Also, shooting a gun that's already pointed at you probably won't work, since it's already built for a person to take force in exactly that direction.

Blade Brake: …or at least the ship sail version. The blade catches on the seams in the sail and bounces out, while a one-piece sail with no seams doesn't provide enough resistance to slow you down or hold your blade in it. They hypothesized, though, that maybe an ideal butter zone between the two could be possible.

Blown Across the Room: A bullet simply does not have the mass required to produce the kind of impact needed to send its target flying backwards. Any bullet that does have that kind of kinetic energy would also send the person firing the gun flying an equal distance in an opposite direction. The difference is that the grip of a pistol and the stock of a rifle will push at the shooter on a relatively wide area, while the bullet impact the target with the same force, but concentrated on a very small impact area. Also, the whole point of a bullet is to penetrate to cause damage, going through the target. Even if bullets could throw people around, they could only do so by not penetrating (think bulletproof vest) - which would usually render them nonlethal, like a beanbag round.

Bottomless Magazines: Obviously real-life guns have a limited carrying capacity in their magazines so there's no sense in testing that. Rather, Kari, Grant, and Tory tested whether or not there was any reality to how long gunfights in movies tend to last (gun battles in film can go on for minutes onscreen or even hours or days within the movie itself). Using automatic weapons (a MAC-10, an Uzi, an AK-47, and an M16), the team emptied each of their magazines in two seconds. With reload time, this was padded to 10 seconds and to go through 100 rounds (using 4 magazines on the Uzi), only 25 seconds. All examples fell far short of the typical Hollywood firefight.

Brainwashed and Crazy/Hypno Fool: Only a part of the human population can even be properly hypnotized in the first place, and you can't ever be hypnotized against your will.

Brown Note: There is no sonic frequency that will cause involuntary bowel movements.

Bullethole Door: It takes a good deal more ammo and time, and much higher powered weaponry, than in the movies. By the time you can chew through a wall or floor, whatever you were trying to get away from will have long since caught you, filled out the paperwork, and be home in bed.

Bulletproof Human Shield/Kevlard: Attempts to stop bullets with cow fat and muscle failed. While it's certainly possible to stop a bullet under a particularly lucky set of circumstances, it's hardly a reliable means of protection. It's best to assume that using a Human Shield to protect yourself will simply result in two victims.

Bull Seeing Red: Disproved both the trope and its most common subversion of bulls being colorblind.

Buried Alive: Not whether it has ever happened, but whether anyone so treated could remain conscious long enough to do anything about it. The lack of oxygen would probably prove fatal within an hour. Additionally, the strength required to force your way back to the surface (as in Kill Bill) is beyond the reach of an ordinary human. Punching through the lid of a wooden coffin while lying on your back is, at best, extremely difficult even for someone with great physical strength (they had the help of MMA fighter Jon Fitch), and even if you succeeded before you ran out of air, you would still be crushed or suffocated by the 108 cubic feet of dirt on top of you.

Burning Rubber: Lots and lots of smoke (until the tires burst), and the resulting rubber powder managed to go from "smouldering" to "small flames" by the end of their lunch break. But no burning tires, and no immediate burn of the tire debris left from the spinning tires, even under their best-case scenario that involved pouring gasoline on the tires as Jamie revved the engine.

Caltrops: Although the spikes did puncture the tires, they also served as plugs that slowed the deflation, thus proving they weren't effective in slowing down the pursuing vehicle. Hollow caltrops, however, will allow the air to escape, deflating the tire(s) much faster, as would a spike strip anchored to the road. A later testing with hollow caltrops confirmed the myth.

Car Fu: Even with a massive truck, you can't just gun it, aim it between 2 lanes and effortlessly push every other car out of the way: while you'll make it through a pair or 2, you'll slow down too much in the progress to get any further. However, when they attached a gigantic cowcatcher in front of the truck, they were able to easily flip over all 16 cars out of their way, barely even slowing down.

Car Skiing: While the stunt itself can be done by a highly-trained driver, the movie portrayal of this as an easy stunt any driver can do was ruled Busted after Jamie was injured in a training run and Adam flipped their car.

Death by Gluttony: Specifically, when it involves Pop Rocks and Cola. These items were fed into a pig's stomach mounted onto a model human skeleton. Normal quantities (say, a packet or two of Pop Rocks and a can of cola) had no appreciable effect. Larger quantities produced a lot of gas, which would lead to bloating and discomfort. But, since the gas produced has...avenues of escape, no explosions. Even clamping both the esophageal end and the duodenal ends of the stomach didn't cause it to explode, even with the massive amounts of both cola and Pop Rocks they used. The only way they got the stomach to explode was to clamp both ends shut immediately after introducing large quantities of cola...and baking soda, which is used as an antacid.

The Build Team did a similar test later with massive amounts of cola and Mentos. This, too, was Busted, because the CO2 was almost all released before the Mentos were introduced, either from the pouring of the drink into the stomach, or by the gas releasing within the stomach itself.

Death Dealer: You cannot throw a regular playing card with enough force to kill someone. However, a playing card can be thrown with enough force to cause cuts (Adam drew blood on Jamie with a card flung from a rather dangerous-looking machine), and could damage someone's eye.

Directionless Driver: While people like this do exist, the common misconception that men are more prone to this than women was Busted. In fact, in the test, not only were men just as likely as women to pull over and ask directions (only two people in the entire sample refused to stop—one man, and one woman), the men actually pulled over (on average) one minute sooner than the women.

Dodge the Bullet: While it is theoretically possible to dodge a .338 Lapua round at 500 yards or greater, it is so unlikely that an actual dodge is more likely to be a fluke than any skill. Furthermore, they had to use bright, flashy tracer rounds as a signal; military bullets don't show a big-enough signature. A later test proved that the same goes for Star Wars laser blasters at a relatively close range of 40 feet.

Don't Eat and Swim: Neither of the 'Busters have ever experienced a stomach cramp during swimming.

Edible Ammunition: In the episode focusing on the "Magic Bullet", Jamie attempted to construct a bullet with hamburger meat. It failed miserably, splattering all over the target and doing little damage.

Elevator Failure: More specifically, the possibility that you can avert death by jumping up as the elevator free-falls. Way too many G's are being pulled for that to work. Even if you tried it, you'd more likely end up in a million pieces like Buster, even if you can jump really high (or happen to have a large spring up your ass.) If it ever does happen, you'd actually want to lie face-down on the floor. (It also helps that elevators are intentionally designed to a) not fall and b) protect people in the unlikely event of this occurrence.)

Every Car Is a Pinto: After firing entire magazines into the full gas tank of a car, they proved that an ordinary bullet cannot ignite gasoline. A revisit with tracer rounds, however, was shown to be plausible. See Shoot the Fuel Tank below. They later tested the "Cars going over cliffs" side of the trope and found that even when the gas tank was strapped to the front, covered in igniters (not even the Pinto was that bad) it would explode, but with nowhere near as much boom as the typical movie would have you believe.

Everyone Loves Blondes: Men are not, as a whole, more attracted to women with blonde hair than women with other hair colors.

Explosion Propulsion: No matter what type of explosive they used and how much, they just couldn't get Buster to fly further than he already could via an explosion. Not even a makeshift glider could propel him any further.

Finger in a Barrel: The victim will lose his finger if not his hand, gun still works if not a bit damaged, and the shooter is always uninjured.

Fruit Cart: While you can drive through one (and it looks absolutely spectacular), driving into hundred-pound piles of fruit and wood crushes the engine and renders the car unusable and covered in fruity slop.

Grappling-Hook Pistol: One actually could be strong enough to pull up the user, but getting the hook to drive into a wall and stick didn't work. But as the MythBusters themselves like to point out, they only busted it for those specific circumstances; Adam used the charges from a standard nailgun, which are designed to drive a nail from a stationary heavy tool being held in place by a person's full mass. To counter both the movement and the low mass of the grappling head during the very short time that the spike is in contact with the wall before rebounding would require a much more powerful propellant... which might work, but it might also just blow the spike or the wall apart.

Jamie was on to something when he speculated that the Alameda Naval Base where they did the testing was built with specially hardened concrete. While that's certainly possible (it is, after all, an abandoned military base), it's also likely that the concrete was just old. There are limits to how much one can harden concrete but it does get progressively harder with age. The gun may well have worked on a more conventional building or a newer one, but for the circumstances as tested, no dice.

Grievous Bottley Harm: Specifically the claim that an empty beer bottle will do more damage when used as a weapon than a full bottle, which was busted. (The extra head trauma that comes with being hit by a heavier bottle is far more dangerous than possible lacerations caused by the empty one.) The idea that getting hit with any sort of beer bottle is not good was Confirmed.

Hair-Trigger Avalanche: Yodeling, cracking a whip, and firing as many as two assault rifles near an unstable snowpack all failed to set one off. They did mention (but did not test) that it could be set off by a skier, though.

They tested out the myth that a defibrillator could cause a nitroglycerin patch to explode. It was soundly busted.

Another one is if C4 can blow up if put into a microwave. It can, but only if it has a blasting cap in it. Additionally, they proved that burning C4 doesn't make it go off. Also, dropping an anvil, stomping it, and shooting it with any bullet they tried didn't make it blow, even while it was burning. For the final try, they ignited thermite right on top of C4. That didn't work.

Busted a Breaking Bad scene. The fulminate of mercury didn't explode when thrown. Then the actors (who were guest-starring) tried to Handwave by saying Walt had a bit of fulminate of silver with the mercury.

Another example would be the claim that a binary explosive used in special effects work can be set off in a car wreck. (Busted, it's far too stable to be set off that way ... and that assumes anyone's dumb enough to transport the stuff already mixed.)

Hollywood Glass Cutter: It isn't possible to remove a circular piece of glass with a suction cup. They could only make a hole after shattering the entire pane of tempered glass from the glass door. Jamie had to pick out the little fractured pieces to get through.

Hollywood Magnetism: The MythBusters proved that magnets can't deflect a bullet, as in Live and Let Die. Or rather, they can, but only with a large amount of super-magnets, nothing like the wristwatch-sized magnet in the movie. And even then it only caused the bullet to ricochet off the magnets, continuing its general direction.

Hypno Fool: Hypnotizing someone into doing a certain thing following a trigger didn't work; archiving mind control through five ways didn't work.

I Know Mortal Kombat: Using golf as the game of choice (since neither Adam nor Jamie had ever played before), Adam showed some improvement after training with an instructor but Jamie's time with John Daly's Prostroke Golf was no help whatsoever.

Implausible Fencing Powers: Given the right circumstances, they managed to break a sword with another sword; however, it still got labeled "Busted", as they didn't get the clean cut so often seen in movies (rather, they bent the blade until it snapped). It also took incredibly superhuman strength from the testing machine and a vast disparity in blade size (claymore vs. rapier) to do even that. Finally, it ruined the cutting blade, which anyone experienced in using bladed weapons (or a modicum of common sense) would have pointed out immediately.

In theory, with a really bad sword, you could "cut" it, but even most ornamental swords are made to not break that easily. The only case where the MythBusters managed such a cut was with a decorative stainless-steel sword as the target.

Impressive Pyrotechnics: Not so much a single myth but numerous examples of real-life high explosive explosions being less impressive than Hollywood balls of flame. The best example would be where they blew up a car Hollywood-style (complete with Adam diving in slow motion away from the ball of fire) then stuffing the remains with C4 and obliterating the entire vehicle in a split second. (Then again, the here-one-moment-gone-the-next aspect of the real explosion was impressive in its own way; it just wasn't impressive in a Hollywood manner.)

Improvised Parachute: A large piece of plywood would be torn from the grip of anyone trying to use it as a parachute. A life raft would be too unstable unless you inflated it and rigged it up as a parachute before falling. Likewise an inflatable airplane escape slide would only work if you strapped yourself to it beforehand. (Not that it matters since you wouldn't be able to get it out of the plane's escape door in that instance, and even if, par impossible, you could, you could only technically survive—if the raft didn't flip over like a coin in mid-air, which is very likely to happen, and did in fact happen during the test.)

Improvised Zipline: Busted in the case of using your pants to zip down a ski lift: There's too much friction, the angle of the lift isn't steep enough, and either the pants or your grip will fail first.

Infrared Xray Camera: Walls are not so transparent to infrared. In fact, the MythBusters successfully used glass to defeat a thermal camera.

iSophagus: Dental fillings are not radio receivers, but they can generate a slight electrical current depending on the filling.

Katanas Are Just Better: Several myths about the almost supernatural superiority of the katana, especially against modern weapons, were shown to be completely false.

Kevlard: Even with a layer of fat equal to that of the biggest man they could find, it could not stop a bullet from reaching vital organs.

Killer Outfit: Specifically, whether some types of shoes cause impaired driving (and can then cause an accident). Though one could argue the result, since neither Jamie nor Adam qualifies as an average driver these days.

They also busted the claim that wearing steel-toed boots is more dangerous than plain leather boots, because the steel will cut your toes off if something is dropped on your feet. They couldn't get a toe slice without going to extremes. And, in any situation where the steel toe cap would fail, a foot in a plain (no toe-area reinforcement) boot would become foot pudding.

The build team looked into the story of a person being killed when the jeans he (or she) is trying to shrink skin-tight cut off blood circulation. After six hours, Grant was showing no sign of impaired blood flow.

Laser Hallway: No security system would be that poorly designed (most systems use invisible infrared beams), and the dust trick might actually break the beam and trigger the alarm.

That said, Kari was able to defeat a motion detector by holding a simple bed sheet in front of her. She even beat it just by moving slowly enough not to break the threshold of motion needed to set it off. (Though of course if that hallway also had cameras then she would've had to answer some very awkward questions.)

Mind-Control Conspiracy: Adam and Jamie donated blood to test the myth that the government was secretly implanting mind control chips in blood donors. They both used stud finders and were unable to find anything.

Moon-Landing Hoax: In episode 104 – "NASA Moon Landing", they tested a number of claims about the moon landing being faked and found that none of them had any merit.

Nail 'Em: Nailguns aren't effective at standard shooting distances, and even in closer ranges, most of the nails failed to penetrate the target.

Never Bring a Knife to a Gun Fight: In a quick-draw shootout, the gun does have a clear advantage, as knives are slower to throw and easier to dodge. But in a free-for-all at close range (Jamie and Adam estimated 18 feet or less), a guy with a knife can run in and stab a gunman before the latter can bring their weapon to bear.

Outrun the Fireball: No matter what's caused the fireball, the fire would always be moving too fast for a human being to escape from, even running at full speed. Also, you couldn't hide in a crevice or other protrusion to avoid it, either; the flames and heat would still catch you, and you'd be roasted.

Outside Ride: Maybe you could hold on if the driver left his windows open, but when they're closed as in most media versions? Nope, you're falling off the moment the driver makes a swerve or a significant turn (or, if you're on the roof, the moment the driver brakes hard).

Parasol Parachute: It would not significantly slow your landing velocity, though it would at least make you far more likely to land feet-first, sacrificing your semi-important legs instead of your all-important head.

Piano Drop: A piano falling on a roof would breach the roof, but would not fall through the supports into the room below it.

Pinball Projectile: They did get their bullet to ricochet three times and hit a cardboard Jamie cutout. However, the specific myth called for the shooter dying from his own bullet, and after three bounces the bullet was moving too slowly to do more than annoy.

Pin-Pulling Teeth: It takes 10 pounds-force to pull the pin from an M67 grenade, which is enough to break or uproot teeth. While people have pulled grenade pins with their teeth in Real Life, it is certainly not as easy as the movies make it appear.

The pin is crimped specifically to make it hard to pull to prevent accidents. Throughout history soldiers have modified their grenades to facilitate easier priming, and has led to several accidents.

Pocket Protector: Items thin enough to fit in a shirt pocket are also too thin to stop a bullet. On the other hand, as Theodore Roosevelt proved, it's possible to have enough in your pocket (specifically, a really thick speech and eyeglasses case) that the bullet doesn't go very far into the body, so this can still be life-saving.

Pretend We're Dead: During their zombie special episode, Tory tried this. It even worked. For a little while. Then Tory got too close to a zombie, and it managed to sniff him out. In a surprisingly good analogue to the fictional scenario, one of the zombies suddenly had a realization that they were looking at Tory in zombie getup when he bumped into him, and an enthused moan immediately drew the attention of all surrounding zombies. It seems that one zombie with fresher eyes or sense of smell would be all it takes to alert the entire horde, and from there it's pretty much over unless you get beyond lucky.

Note: Largely depends on how it is dropped and from what height. Being brushed off a counter causes the toast to rotate. The average height of counters, between 3 and 4 feet, means it falls just far enough to go through half a rotation, which results in butter side down. Dropped from a vertical position 30 feet above the ground is 50/50.

Also, spreading butter and/or jam on toast changes the aerodynamic shape and weight distribution. Butter depresses the toast and makes a parachute-like pocket while jam, peanut butter, and similar heavy spreads make one side heavier. Both will affect the "flight-path" and result in a non 50/50 distribution of slices landing side up or side down.

Pyramid Power: Pyramids don't have any preserving powers. Milk, fruit, and flowers in pyramids have been spoiled at the same rate as those that weren't in pyramids.

The reason this trope became a trope in the first place is that people tend to panic in quicksand. Their frantically moving limbs create little vacuums in the sand that do indeed make it harder to escape. It still won't swallow a person up completely, though.

Rise from Your Grave: Impossible for a normal human being. While, to be sure, most characters who do this aren't normal, the MythBusters team lacked any examples of said non-normals to test with.

Rocket Jump: Tested in a few different variants, but in every case an explosion shockwave failed to affect the trajectory of a midair object.

Safecracking: The "listening-to-the-tumblers" method was busted; safes generally have this designed out of them. However, Adam was able to eventually get the safe open by prying the lock off and using piano wire to move the tumblers into place, using a borescope to watch what he was doing. When they finally got the safe open, they were informed by Grant that safes are rated in minutes that an expert safecracker would be able to get in. They'd taken 45 minutes to open a five-minute safe. Still, for their first try, and the fact that they had to do so in relative silence (while the techniques used to rate a safe aren't nearly as stealthy), it was actually not too bad of a performance. Also, the first 20 minutes was wasted on the stethoscope technique.

Saint-Bernard Rescue: For one, Saint Bernard rescuers of this type don't exist.note The original St. Bernard rescue dogs were trained to find victims, lie on them to keep them warm, and bark so the human rescuers could find them. Two, drinking alcohol while your life is in danger from exposure to cold is a really, REALLY bad idea. This is because while it does make you feel warmer, for a brief time, it does so by allowing blood to flow to the extremities more easily, thereby warming up your arms and legs at the cost of lowering your core body heat faster. Thus, your fingers and toes will warm up for a bit, but you're going to freeze a lot faster in the end.

In fact, lowering blood flow to the arms and legs is exactly what your body does in the cold, because they act as radiators, bleeding off heat. In extreme circumstances, sacrificing a few fingers or toes to frostbite is better than freezing to death, and alcohol undoes this procedure. That said, alcohol can be legitimately administered after a rescue once the victim is near a heat source, specifically to promote blood flow to the extremities to prevent or reduce frostbite.

Seesaw Catapult: The team tested a variant about a skydiver who crashed onto a playground seesaw after his parachute failed, launching a child who miraculously landed on a high rise and survived. After some very bizarre experiments, they concluded that A) the impact would cause any seesaw to instantly buckle that wasn't made from industrial materials (which, the Mythbusters being overdoers by principle, theirs was), and B) there's no way in hell that either the kid or skydiver would survive.

Sheet of Glass: Specifically, can the people carrying the glass walk away unscathed? For regular plate glass, probably not; though one of the dummies managed to avoid getting hit with glass shards, it was more random chance than anything. For laminated glass designed to hold together, it's possible, but the glass breaks apart in a fashion not generally seen in Hollywood. But for tempered glass, absolutely not; the glass shatters into a ton of little pieces that would coat whoever was holding it in a rain of sharp glass shards.

Shoot the Fuel Tank: Shooting the fuel tank will not cause a car to explode. Using tracer rounds, you might set the fuel on fire. (Which is still a dangerous situation, but not an instant explosion.)

Shoot the Rope: Takes exceptional aim, implausibly large caliber ammo and likely more than one shot to the same spot.

Silver Bullet: Silver warps as it cools, so bullets made of it don't fly straight.

Smoldering Shoes: For the variant where a person is sent flying (rather than burned or disintegrated), it is at best very hard to knock someone's footwear clean off; see "knock your socks off" in the "Adages" folder for details.

Soft Glass: Ordinary glass breaks with nice sharp edges. It's also surprisingly difficult to shatter. However, running through a high-rise window is easier than expected due to the pressure difference between outside and inside (and repeated stress on such a window can cause it to fracture without warning).

Soft Water: Disrupting the surface tension of the water doesn't cushion the fall.

While landing in water causes less damage than landing on pavement, you would still suffer significant damage when falling from 600 feet or more. The best you can say of water is that it's softer.

Jumping into a mattress floating on a shallow pool does not lessen the injuries from jumping from a height. In fact it makes them worse.

Solar-Powered Magnifying Glass: In the large-scale weaponized version supposedly used by Archimedes. It is possible to set things on fire with lenses or mirrors, but doing it to a large, distant moving target is highly implausible. This was tested several times, even at the behest of Barack Obama, all in vain.

Splitting the Arrow: You won't get a full nock-to-tip split a laRobin Hood with a normal wooden arrow. A hollow bamboo arrow, on the other hand...

It's also impossible to do it reliably, no matter how good your aim is, because of an arrow's natural wobble in flight.

Tastes Like Chicken: Tory and Grant were fed multiple exotic meats, with actual chicken randomly shifted in. A second test was held, where the meats were processed to eliminate texture as an identifying factor. In both rounds of testing, Tory could spot the actual chicken roughly 9 times out of 10, and Grant had a similar percentage in the second round, but in the first round Grant was only about 50:50 due to the preparation (which involved deep-frying and seasoning) somewhat masking the flavor of the meats.

Tree Buchet: Despite trimming branches, using a tether to stop the tree at its apex, and pulling back to maximum, they could only fling Buster less than 100 feet. That being said, they tested the myth in California, instead of using trees native to England.

Throwing Your Knife Always Works: They found that while a moderately-trained knife thrower could throw one before getting shot by a person with a gun, the shot is quicker and the shooter can dodge the knife.

Vapor Trail: Gasoline will burn in a continuous line following a leaking source and, if it manages to catch up with a car, can burn up the stream to ignite the fuel in the tank, but a car would have to be traveling very slowly (less than 5 mi/h) for the flame to catch it. Further, burning fuel in the tank will not cause the car to explode. Also, only gasoline will burn like this; it does not work with either jet fuel or diesel.

Technically speaking, liquid gasoline doesn't ignite, it's the vapors mixed with air. Hence the rate of burning depends heavily on the temperature, air movement and other factors.

Viewers Are Goldfish: Well, they busted the part about a goldfish having only a three-second memory (Adam's tank's roughly three-second lifespan was a side issue).

Walk on Water: The ninja type, anyway. Also busted a viral video use of it. Via their mastery of special effect showed that it was likely done via a submerged bridge, rendered invisible by the dirty water in the lake and the oblique angle of the shot.

Weaponized Headgear: Razor-edged hats can't destroy statues, at least not the types seen in the movies. However a hollow marble statue and a plaster one with no internal skeleton could plausibly be decapitated.

Zorro Mark: At least as far as application of The Phantom's skull logo through direct force is concerned. Any punch with enough force to leave a mark is going to do a heck of a lot more damage than a ring imprint.

Other tropes tested

Abnormal Ammo: Yes, they fire a bunch of strange stuff normally, but there was a segment centered around pirates using Abnormal Ammo. Bottles of rum, silverware, and a Seadog Peg Leg were all busted. Big old nails, however, proved damaging (earning a "Plausible"), as did directionalized steak knives in a sabot (also "Plausible"). But when they fired a chain, the target pig was annihilated. It had nearly been torn in half, and the chain was still completely intact, earning a confirmation. This is Truth in Television: Chain shot, two small cannonballs connected by a chain, was designed to destroy the sails and rigging of enemy ships at close range.

In other segments, ice bullets, gelatin bullets, and meat bullets were all busted. They either melted, fragmented, or didn't have enough mass to seriously damage the target. "Bio" bullets (made from tooth or bone) were potentially lethal in certain cases, but ruled busted because they failed the myth's criteria of being able to fool a forensic pathologist. Coins, on the other hand, could be potentially lethal. Perhaps the oddest ammo tested? People ("Human Slingshot").

Cannonballs made of various types of stone, 16th-century anti-personnel style (back when iron was more expensive and heavier than stone, so it was worth stocking stone ammo for use against squishy infantry), naturally proved plausible - with the added bonus of self-destructing upon impact.

They also managed to prove that a 16 ounce slushy drink thrown from a moving car did carry enough energy to smash the windshield of an oncoming vehicle, though the underlying myth of the drink continuing through to kill the driver was busted. However, they did point out that the sudden loss of visibility and the flying glass (not to mention getting the crap scared out of you) were more than sufficient to cause a secondary accident that could kill you.

Grenade in the Fridge: Busted. While a fridge will protect you from a grenade in the most pointlessly literal sense, you are now in danger of being killed by a high-velocity chunk-of-fridge. (From Monk)

Bomb on the Toilet: Confirmed. While freezing the battery is likely to give you more than the 2-3 seconds depicted in the movie, a cast-iron bathtub does make that kind of bomb survivable, and it's possible to get into the tub and covered with the bomb blanket very quickly. (From Lethal Weapon 2)

However, the toilet will not be launched, intact, through the roof. It will be disintegrated in the bathroom.

Other objects (a wooden table, a car, a Dumpster, and a cinderblock wall) were tested for their ability to resist bomb blasts. The table splintered heavily but still prevented the bomb blast from being lethal (didn't Stauffenberg and Hitler already confirm this one?); the others were all successful in blunting the blast damage.

A later test involved bedliner sprayed on a cinderblock wall. Result: confirmed; the bedliner made the wall significantly more resistant to the blast (the wall barely even cracked).

Another episode tested a filing cabinet, a fish tank, a bed, and a garbage truck. The filing cabinet significantly reduced the blast radius but, again, just created flying metal shrapnel that is just as lethal. The other three didn't reduce the radius by very much, but did noticeably redirect the force of the explosion in one direction (straight up for the bed, out the wide walls of the fish tank, and directly behind the garbage truck). As the Mythbusters explained at the end of the episode, stuffing a bomb into a closed space will just make a large grenade, but putting it in something that can funnel the blast in one direction means you can hide in another direction and remain safe.

Brand Names Are Better: The claim that running cheap vodka through a home water filtration pitcher multiple times makes it taste just like expensive vodka was busted. While it did improve the taste, it did not make it a top-shelf vodka (which has a completely different chemical composition) and the six filters required cost more than the expensive vodka. Jamie came close to identifying all the samples correctly, and their guest expert was completely accurate; both ranked the top-shelf vodka above all the others. Kari, on the other hand, actually ranked the unfiltered rotgut significantly higher than the top-shelf vodka.

The Coconut Effect: Busted for punching (the sound alone is nowhere near as loud, and requires some touching up with various methods), Confirmed for rattlesnakes (that is, they made the same noises they do in the movies), plausible for silencers (The sound was reduced to a similar degree as shown on film, but the sound itself is different than the "thwip" effect we hear), and busted for explosions (Explosions made the same way in movies, with gasoline, make more of a "foomfph" sounds than a "Boom", and even the real explosion they used lacked some of the harmonics of the Hollywood explosion).

A wooden table, a metal dumpster, a cinderblock wall, and a car all proved capable at reducing the harm done by a blast of a 3lb chunk of C4. The destruction of the table and wall at 10ft (which, unprotected, is the instant death radius) could be fatal anyway, however, and there's still threshold for injury. Nonetheless, the myth in this situation was Confirmed.

The MythBusters proved that it was indeed possible to shoot someone through a wall with a handgun. Very few items inside household walls will deflect or absorb a bullet (and neither drywall nor lat and plaster by themselves do very much). Furthermore, it's very possible, with good hearing and glimpsing the target, to pull off the trick in a realistic situation. The myth was that it was possible to shoot someone through a wall in this manner, so the myth was Confirmed while the trope was Busted.

Deadly Rotary Fan: They demonstrated that a ceiling fan would not be capable of actually decapitating a person, but their modified industrial fan fitted with a lawnmower motor would certainly be lethal to anyone who got too close, even if not actually capable of slicing through their spinal column.

Ejection Seat: A couple of myths have dealt with these. You could make a ejector seat that's reasonably inconspicuous, but you'll need to use pneumatic power to launch it since rocket propellant would cook the car interior.

Firing in the Air a Lot: It's obviously possible to shoot into the air; what they tested was whether these bullets could kill on the way down. If a bullet was fired straight up, it wouldn't be deadly—but a human is more likely to fire the gun at a bit of an angle (a sufficient angle would allow the bullet to maintain a ballistic trajectory); injury reports from such bullets confirm this. While it's a documented fact that people have been hurt or killed by stray bullets fired into the air, the team was ultimately unable to replicate such an occurrence in the lab, leaving their test inconclusive. They ruled the myth "Busted, Plausible and Confirmed", chucking all three signs into the results shot.

Firing One-Handed: With a handgun at shoulder level, aimed normally, it actually does work nearly as well as their control (the two-handed Weaver technique).

Guns Akimbo: Not as inaccurate as Gangsta Style, but still not nearly as accurate as their control. (True for both single and multiple targets.) However, a later test firing off both guns simultaneously (as opposed to shooting gun #1, then gun #2, then #1 again, etc) proved to be somewhat viable. Jamie and Adam were more accurate with both single and dual targets.

Hangover Sensitivity: Used as a method for testing the myth that drinking both beer and liquor will give you a worse hangover than drinking only beer (that myth was busted; while Tory had a splitting headache he didn't with the beer alone, the other hangover symptoms were not as pronounced, and Grant was far better off).

Hard-to-Light Fire: While not itself a myth that's been tested, this trope is the bane of any myth involving flame. There have been several cases where the team has tried to light something on fire as part of a test, but had trouble doing so.

The Hindenburg: They debunked the idea that the Hindenburg's paint job was what caused the explosion and fire, rather than the hydrogen contained inside. They "built 1/50th scale Hindenburg models to test this myth. The model that contained hydrogen gas burned twice as quickly as the model without hydrogen. While the painted skin did burn vigorously, it is not what caused the Hindenburg to burn as quickly as it did." However, the theory that the paint on the zeppelin could have burned like thermite (a self-oxidizing combustible material) actually had some basis in fact; there were some brief thermite reactions as the first two zeppelin models burned. (This "busts" a common counter-argument, that the paint could not have been at fault because it could not have burned like thermite.) In fact, the model with the correct paint job AND hydrogen burned almost exactly like the real one.

Jet Pack: They couldn't build one from plans purchased off the internet and limited funds. And as Jamie points out, they're not very safe anyway because they offer almost no protection if you crash while using one.

The Last Straw: Not even the weight of a California Condor, the biggest bird in North America at over 20 pounds, could push a car at its tipping point over a cliff by landing on the hood.

Throwing over a dozen frozen chickens on the hood of the balanced car had no effect.

Literal Cliffhanger: Even a strong person with a good grip couldn't hold on for more than about a minute before losing their grip.

Microwave the Dog: While they teased that they would test this myth at the beginning of one show, they instead flatly stated that they have a No Animals Were Harmed policy and will not be doing this one.

Mind-Control Device: They tested a number of them. Most of them were busted, though a couple were deemed plausible, but just barely. A rotating magnet seemed to have an effect on the test subject's brainwaves, but it might have actually been having an effect on the EEG machine they were using. And a remote hypnosis machine seemed to show a minor effect. In either case, neither would allow direct control of a person's mind.

No Sense of Direction: If a person is blindfolded and has their ears plugged, they will be unable to travel in a straight line. An ordinary person with their sight reduced (not eliminated) can easily get lost in unfamiliar territory (in a similar fashion), though wilderness training can help avert this.

When they tested a scene from Burn Notice, they found that there's too much stuff on the underside of a car to count on a bullet finding its way through ... and that shooting the tires gave them a flat within half a mile.

When they looked at various spy-movie gadgets, tires that drove over solid caltrops deflated very slowly. Jamie's tire-slashing rig worked better, but Adam was still able to maintain control of the target car. A later test with hollow caltrops gave air an escape route and completely wrecked the tires in a matter of minutes.

Driving with a full bladder is as dangerous as driving drunk: Busted. While Adam's driving was impaired when his bladder was at max capacity, his score was much worse when he drove the course almost legally drunk.

When the build team tested whether being stressed while driving affected fuel economy, one of the chosen stresses was a full bladder. Tory and Grant had much worse miles-per-gallon numbers on the "stressed" runs, though with everything Kari threw at them it's impossible to judge how much of the effect was from needing to pee.

Ramp Jump: Tested in multiple variations, with different versions yielding different results. Using examples based on movies (see folder below), the jumps from Speed and Wanted were failures, but Live and Let Die's jump was Plausible, and the stunt from Cannonball Run 3 only worked once the team got rid of the ramp.

Red Herring: The literal version was tested on a police bloodhound in the Hair of the Dog episode. This was the episode's most effective distraction for the bloodhound, as it first tried to stop and eat the herring, and then it temporarily lost the trail. However, after the handler led the dog back to Jamie's scent trail (near the herring), the dog picked the trail back up and managed to track Jamie down. Because it didn't completely throw off the bloodhound, it was considered Busted.

The scene in True Lies where the MAC-10 goes off as it falls down stairs is Busted; the gun is specifically designed not to go off that way, as most guns are.

The urban myth regarding the Russian SKS rifle going off due to a loud stereo was Busted; however, the SKS's free-floating firing pin did present a genuine danger, which the MythBusters proved by placing the four rifles near an explosive—one of the guns did go off of its own accord.

Right on Queue: A "serpentine" queue in a supermarket, with one line for multiple cash registers, is slower than if each register had its own line. Despite this, the serpentine scored better in customer satisfaction.

Rope Bridge: Not that they exist, that's Confirmed. However, you're not going to run/jump for the far end after the bad guys chop through the support cables. Hanging on for dear life and then climbing up the remains of the bridge, on the other hand, is Plausible.

Also, they built one out of duct tape.

Tablecloth Yank: The guys showed how the trick works, and (eventually) Adam mastered it with a single small table and one placesetting. However, the viral video they were testing called for a long table set for a banquet, and pulling the cloth off with a motorcycle. That was ruled Busted; even when Jamie got his custom bike up to 100 mi/h it wasn't going fast enough to leave dishes on table. (They also demonstrated a way the video's creators could have faked the trick.)

Talking to Plants: They used speakers set on a loop playing various things (kind words, harsh words, classical music, death metal) in order to remove extra carbon dioxide from actual people speaking to them potentially messing things up. The whole experiment, unfortunately, got compromised when the timer for the automatic sprinklers failed and the pea plants began to wither, but as all the samples were affected the same way the experiment was deemed to still be valid. The results suggest sound of any kind helps plants grow - moreover, heavy metal was the best.

Axe Vs. Gun: Axe wins, but not by much. The reload time on the shotgun was too significant compared to the swing of an axe, but it's irrelevant anyway because if you're surrounded on all sides, you're going down regardless. They later revisited it with adjustments made to both the axe (to make sure it was swung with the proper weight and force needed) and the gun (a semiautomatic was used, as opposed to a pump-action in the original test); while the gap between the two was smaller thanks to more effort needed to strike a proper blow with the axe, it still performed better than the gun.note At least when caught out in the open with limited range and no cover. The revisit also added a third weapon, a chainsaw, which handily outperformed both.

Zombie Doorbuster: Confirmed, it took nearly 100 zombies, but with the weight of so many bodies not even pushing with their hands, your standard wooden barn door bar didn't stand a chance. Although when given the time to fortify the doors and hinges, Jamie was able to keep them out.

Distracting a horde: Distractions work, be it through a mechanical noise-making machine or a victim duct-taped to a chair. Outright booking it also works if you're nimble enough to avoid any infectious scratchings, and if the horde of zombies is not too thick.note All scenarios assume a safe zone within sprinting distance, focusing on the feasibility of getting to it through an increasingly dense concentration of zombies in the area. Disguising yourself as a zombie is by far the riskiest strategy - see Pretend We're Dead.

Adages tested

"A rolling stone gathers no moss" (keep moving and you won't gain wealth): Confirmed. Moss cannot grow on a rolling stone. While it can collect some from rolling down a hill, that's not really the spirit of the expression.

"Bull in a china shop" (mindless destruction): Busted. The bulls actively avoided the china, to the MythBusters' surprise, and it turned out they're agile enough to trot through a china shop.

"Finding a needle in a haystack" (a near-impossible task): Confirmed. Even with modern technology and all the ingenuity of the MythBusters, this is still hard and time-consuming. This was revisited as part of The Search, but the results were much the same.

"Go over like a lead balloon" (i.e. not well at all): Busted. It is possible to make a balloon out of lead, fill it with helium, and have it become buoyant. You just need to use really thin foil, and the care and patience of a saint. And they actually made it happen. No speculation on Jimmy Page's reaction.

"Like shooting fish in a barrel" (really easy): Confirmed. Even if the bullet touches none of the fish, the shockwave it creates passing through would severely injure or kill every fish in there. Going after it with a gatling gun was just for Rule of Cool. Possibly moot, since the proverbial barrels would have been packed with fish which were already dead and pickled anyway.

"You can't teach an old dog new tricks" (too set in their ways to adapt): Busted. Old dogs could be taught new tricks, albeit with some difficulty.

"You can't polish a turd" (you can't make an unpleasant thing appealing): Busted, at least if the idea is making the turd shiny, though the point of the adage is more that it won't stop being a turd. You can do it (at least with some species' droppings) solely with water, patience, and hopefully a lot of hand soap afterwards.

"Hit the ground running" (start a task with speed and energy): Busted. If you're being dropped on the ground, actively trying to run in the air to get a head start will slow you down. They also tried to hit the ground running with a bicycle and a car. The rig to drop the bike worked just fine, but the friction of the tire when it hit the ground and Tory's weight caused the bike to stop when the wheel touched the ground. Likewise, when they dropped the front end of a car to the ground, the impact caused the car to bounce just enough that it caused a delay in the movement of the vehicle.

There is also the reason many modern sports cars have traction control (a purpose-built version of the system to get a good standing start being called launch control) - excessive wheelspin, which also happened in the vehicle tests above, only results in loss of traction and thus poorer acceleration times. (some degree of wheelspin is necessary to avoid the same sort of "bogging" seen in Tory's bike experiment.)

"Better to end with a bang" (a bigger ending is a better ending; not related to our Out with a Bang trope): To test this, Jamie and Adam each set something up to end the episode with; Adam took the "bang" by blowing up a moped while Jamie opted for a slow burn by having thermite cut an SUV in half. Adam preferred the bang but Jamie preferred the burn, so they left it up to the audience and set up a viewer poll on the website; The Other Wiki reports that the results were about three to two in favor of the bang, making it Confirmed.

"Knock their socks off" (awe and overwhelm, like a blow that physically hoists you out of your shoes): Busted, at least the traditional depiction. The kinetic energy from a battering ram, let alone a punch, could not knock the socks off of Buster by pure force alone. The team WAS able to remove socks off of dummy legs with a shockwave generated by high explosives, but the explosion would be fatal even at the maximum distance required for them to be blown off.

Note that one shot of the vertical pneumatic cannon did knock his shoes off and the shoes pulled the socks halfway off. Unfortunately the socks were not completely off and the cannon was far stronger than any boxer.

In a revisit of the myth, the team even redid the same tests including a new set of tests using the best set of variables possible (smooth, shaven legs wearing loose-fitting woolen socks) to see if they would get knocked off and were still unsuccessful with the original tests. However, while they ultimately were able to knock the socks off of Buster (as well as his hands and his entire left leg), it required hitting him with a vehicle-mounted battering ram at 65 mi/h, roughly 10,000 times the kinetic force of a human boxer. (This was enough for a Plausible, however.)

"When the shit hits the fan, everything gets covered" (a bad event affects everyone indiscriminately): Plausible under certain circumstances. When they tested it with small fans, there was only partial coverage, but with a large fan and softer stools, they got it to work. Even Jamie's white shirt was not spared.

"Getting cold feet" (getting nervous): Plausible. Fear can cause a person to literally experience a drop in temperature in their feet, but they still called Plausible rather than Confirmed because Tory's results were inconclusive.

"Like taking candy from a baby" (easy): Busted. It takes a surprising amount of force to take candy from a baby and the baby will cry, making you feel horribly guilty just making the attempt.

"Know it like the back of my hand" (know it well): Confirmed. A sample of volunteers did surprisingly well picking out the back of their hands from a lineup, significantly better than the palms of their hands, and also marginally better than their teeth.

"Like herding cats" (not easy): Confirmed. Cats aren't herd animals, so trying to get a group of cats who didn't know or like each other to gather in one place is pretty difficult. Try as they might Adam and Jamie couldn't get more than three of them into a pen, even using catnip-covered mouse toys, umbrellas, and a herding dog.

"Like trying to catch a greased pig" (difficult): Busted, one of the standard methods for grabbing runaway pigs (by the hind legs and then dragging them) turned out to be very simple and the grease was completely irrelevant. That said, grabbing a greased pig by its actual body is much more difficult but far from impossible.

"Trying to fit ten pounds of poop in a five-pound bag" (impossible): Confirmed. Sure, they took ten pounds of manure, compressed it, and it fit in a five-pound bag — but the compression squeezed out two-and-a-half-pounds of liquid. Since the final weight was less than ten pounds, it doesn't count as a success.

"Blown out of the water" (awed and amazed): Busted. While a charge at the right depth could hoist a toy boat, the full-sized boat was simply destroyed. They ruled this busted because the spirit of the expression was for the boat to be blown out of the water intact, not just 'blown up.'

"Can't punch his way out of a paper bag" (a weak or ineffectual fighter)note Keep in mind, however, that the aphorism is sometimes rendered as "can't punch his way out of a wet paper bag".: Confirmed. With boxing gloves on, Adam took more than a minute to punch his way out of a large paper bag. With his bare hands, however, it took just two seconds. This is because the boxing gloves distributed the force of the punch over a much larger area, while bare hands focused it on the point of Adam's knuckles.

Stunts and FX Tested

As time went on, MythBusters has shifted from investigating urban legends and general media tropes to testing that one scene from that one movie. (Or they'll be testing a general trope and name a specific work as an example; we list those too.) Note that potential spoilers for the original works may be unmarked.

Locked in a lumberyard for an hour, the A-Team jury-rigs log cannons that fire 2x4s - Busted. The gas propulsion always escaped around the 2x4s, and even when that was plugged they could never figure out the right mix of gasses that would launch the boards without damaging the log barrel. Afterward, though, they challenged themselves with the same situation the A-Team was in and succeeded by using a pitching machine-like firing mechanism.

The Search used a similar challenge based on a different A-Team episode, to build something that fires cabbages from junkyard scrap. Even though one team skirted the rules with a technically-legal computerized component unlikely to be found in a junkyard, both teams made workable rigs, ruling the concept Plausible.

Dynamite is planted under a manhole and detonated under the villains' car; disabling it without killing anyone - Plausible. The manhole cover and sewer system muffled and redirected the blast effectively enough to keep anyone from being seriously hurt while still damaging the car.

The Adventures of Robin Hood (and by proxy many other Robin Hood works): Splitting the Arrow - Busted. This doesn't work for multiple reasons, such as the fact that arrows wobble in flight instead of flying truly straight, or that (wooden) arrows split along the grain which rarely if ever reaches the entire length. It could work better with easily-splittable bamboo arrows, but Robin Hood didn't have that available.

American Graffiti: Tying an anchored cable around a car's rear axle, so when the car takes off the axle is ripped clean off - Busted. The cable snapped, not the axle.

His infamous Grappling-Hook Pistol - Busted. The details are up above, but the short version is that a grapple gun could haul a human's weight well enough, but it has problems embedding the hook into a wall.

Taking a sharp corner in the Batmobile at high speed by firing a cable at the corner and using it to help swing the car around - Busted. The cable always snapped from the forces involved (although there is some debate whether the clips used on the cables caused this, as the breaks were always at the clips, and whether splicing would have prevented it).

Body of Lies: A squad of cars circle their target to kick up dust and hide their activities from a spy drone - Busted. While you kick up enough dust to obscure vision at ground level, it doesn't really help regarding the overhead view. And even if it did, most drones are equipped with thermal cameras.

The Bourne Supremacy: Jason Bourne detonates a condo by letting the gas leak and stuffing a newspaper into a toaster for an ignition source - Busted. Only by sealing the space, flooding it with methane gas to 9%, adding fans to circulate the air, and having a precisely-timed ignition could the Mythbusters achieve an explosive blowout like the one shown in the film.

Dissolving a corpse in a bathtub, only to find that hydrofluoric acid will also eat through the bathtub and the bathroom floor, dropping what's left of the corpse one floor down. Busted - first off, in small-scale lab testing, the hydrofluoric didn't eat through any of the test materials. When they ramped it up to sulfuric acid spiked with "special sauce", they got a destroyed body all right, but the tub survived.

Walt throws mercury fulminate to detonate it as a grenade. Busted - a human-force throw failed to detonate the amount of mercury fulminate the show cites. When it was set off remotely, the blast would have injured everyone in the room, including Walt ... and would have poisoned them as well, because the windows didn't break and therefore the fumes were trapped inside.

Walt builds a machine gun rig from household parts that can be placed in the trunk of a car and remotely activated to strafe the wall of a nearby apartment and kill the occupants. Plausible - Adam and Jamie had to add additional (but still common) parts to what was shown, but the rig was otherwise accurate to the show and it worked (on the third try). The bullets penetrated the wall and did massive damage to the standing targets behind it, while missing a target on the ground representing Walt. They commented that the move was still risky since the bullets fired in a wild spread instead of an even horizontal line, but show creator Vince Gilligan was there to comment that Walt 1) was trying to enact Taking You with Me and didn't expect to survive and 2) really was shot by his trap and soon died from bleeding out.note Gilligan was actually dismayed to see that he'd miscalculated the placement of the bullet holes, not realizing that they would be clustered at the ends since the gun was firing on a side-to-side sweep. The real gun also fired longer than the gun in the scene.

Bron|Broen/The Bridge (both titles were used in-show): A woman had to hold down the trigger on a grenade to keep it from detonating for two hours; the myth tested was that it was truly difficult to do so - Busted. Adam's arm cramped, but at the end of the two hours he was still holding the dummy grenade and claimed he could keep going. After the test, he proved he could also use items at hand to bind the grenade instead of holding it himself.

When in a car chase and you want to disable the trailing car without killing the driver, Michael advises to ricochet a bullet underneath the car where it's less-guarded instead of shooting it head-on - Busted. There's still too much stuff for a bullet to reliably get through underneath. Aim for the tires instead.

You can survive a three-story drop into shallow water by throwing a mattress in first and jumping on that - Busted. Hitting the water might kill you, but hitting a mattress floating on water would be an even worse impact.

Caddyshack: A gopher colony stuffed with C4 explodes into a massive fireball and the shockwave tips a golf ball over the edge of a hole 50 feet away - Busted. While the explosion was impressive, it wasn't fiery and didn't move the ball.

The Cannonball Run 3: Skipping a car across a lake like a stone - Busted as far as the movie's portrayal goes. However, with just a few tweaks (a supercharged engine and ditching the ramp) the MythBusters pulled it off.

Cliffhanger: After the bad guys cut the end of a Rope Bridge, Sylvester Stallone's character takes a running leap as it collapses and makes it to the edge - Busted. The bridge would collapse under you immediately with no time to jump, much less get a running start.

The Count of Monte Cristo: Severing a sword's blade with another sword - Busted. Although several blades were seriously damaged, none were truly severed.

CSI: Using pepper spray and a stun gun on a man resulting in him being set on fire - Plausible. With the right pepper spray and the right shirt material, a stun gun will ignite a fire. Adam and Jamie appear in the referenced episode as lab technicians, in the very scene where the investigators test the circumstances of the myth themselves, bringing the myth full-circle.

CSI: Miami: Diamonds can be artificially manufactured using graphite and a pressure cooker - Busted. Several DIY diamond-making processes were tested (not just the one from CSI) and all of them failed.

Deep Blue Sea: The heroes take black powder from flares, put it into a canister with a cable attached, harpoon it to a shark, and ignite it by touching the other end of the cable to a car battery, thereby blowing up the shark. There's also a swimmer in the water that has to survive the blast. Due to the complexity of the scene, the Build Team broke it down into five submyths:

"Battery ignition spark?" - Busted. The team tried igniting a submerged canister of black powder with wires attached to a car battery, but nothing happened.

"Harpoon accuracy?" - Confirmed. The harpoon gun could easily shoot the 100 feet shown in the movie. However, it was retroactively busted by later tests as the real movie stunt would require more explosive and weigh down the harpoon.

"Blackpowder flare fakery?" - Busted. Flares don't hold near enough black powder to get the "two and a half sticks of dynamite" worth the movie claimed.

"2.5 sticks of dynamite = huge boom?" - Busted. The actual amount of powder gleaned from flares caused so little of a blast that the team thought they had a malfunction. An actual 2.5 sticks of dynamite were better, but still didn't match the movie.

"Underwater survival?" - Busted. Using the blast size from the movie, a swimmer about 50 feet away would die from the shockwave. The safe distance is closer to 150 feet.

Drive: As in several movies, a car can be thrown into reverse and driven backwards effectively - Plausible. There's a trick to doing it; lean out and back in your seat as close to the car's center as possible to give yourself the best view out the rear window.

The Dukes of Hazzard: A car jumping a large distance using a mound of dirt as a ramp - Busted. Despite the car almost duplicating the estimated distance of the film's jump, it was completely destroyed upon landing.

2 Fast 2 Furious: One of the heroes uses an Ejection Seat that launches the victim horizontally out the passenger door - Plausible. On The Search, one of the teams made a sideways-firing seat that not only worked but managed to look inconspicuous as well.

Fast Five: The common action-movie trope where an SUV is hit with an RPG and flips over in a ball of flame - Busted. RPGs are designed to pierce vehicle armor and mess stuff up inside, which is exactly what they do. No flip, not much flame.

Fruit Ninja: Does this fruit-slicing game actually work in real life? - Busted. Real fruit is smaller and falls faster than in the game, making them harder targets to hit. You also have to worry about the angle of your blade in real life, where in the game it's a nonissue. On the other hand, slashing real fruit with a katana is a lot more fun.

The bad guys bury the Black Beauty with Green Hornet and Kato in it, and park a bulldozer on top for good measure. Our heroes escape by firing the car's missiles to blow the bulldozer off while they duck behind armored seats - Busted. The explosion only makes a sinkhole that the bulldozer falls into, and there's no way for anyone inside the car - or even the car itself - to survive the blast.

The Black Beauty gets caught and cut in half by an elevator, and the front half is driven out of the building - the official verdict is "Plausible", but there are some qualifiers. First, even with structural damage from hundreds of bullet holes and with a forklift more powerful than any elevator, the car won't be cut in half; it has crushing force instead of cutting force. Second, even taking into account that Kato modified the car to be front-wheel-drive, the Busters had to make additional modifications to make a half-car run. The Plausible verdict was mainly due to the fact that Seth Rogen was on-set to argue that Kato really was that Crazy-Prepared.

The Grey: Improvised Weapons consisting of wooden spears with shotgun shells attached to the tips are used to drive off wolves - Busted. The points of the spears couldn't set off the shells. The team guessed that nails or screws could have been found and attached to the spears as firing pins, which worked, but the blast failed to injure the wolf dummy at all. They added that if you have time to get a branch that sharp, you should just use the damn thing as a spear because they're one of the oldest weapons in the world for a reason.

Headhunters: Roger survives having a truck smash into the car he's in, knocking it off a cliff, because the two overweight cops in the car with him act as living (at the start) crash cushions - Busted. When Adam smashed a truck into their test car, the SynDaver took more damage — including decapitation — than the one from the control crash, with no one sharing the back seat. The crash would be lethal either way, but the human body (represented in this test by foam dummies filled with water) isn't compressible enough to serve as a cushion.

Hellboy: Hellboy drops his Right Hand of Doom on the hood of a moving car, causing it to somersault - Busted. The leverage is all off; with the front wheels acting as a fulcrum, the point of impact is too close to that point to lift the back end very high.

Disarming a man by whipping at his hand - Plausible. Either grabbing the wrist or hitting the hand directly can get an attacker to drop his gun.

To get past a chasm, Indy whips an overhead branch and swings across - Plausible. If the branch has enough bark for the whip to get a good grip, it will support a man's weight.

Indy runs down a temple corridor, outrunning the poison dart traps he sets off on the way - Plausible. When the test traps were on a one-second delay as in the film, Adam outran them handily. When set to fire the instant he stepped on a pressure pad, he only got hit once; so getting out unscathed was judged possible.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: Surviving a fall through several awnings - Plausible. Despite Buster being severely damaged, shock sensors indicated that he would've survived (albeit with serious injuries) if he was alive.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: Indy makes a motorcycle wipe out by sticking a pole into its wheel spokes - again, Busted for the movie portrayal. Making the bike crash works well enough, but making it flip end-over-end requires studio pyrotechnics.

Bond's typical insistence on "shaken, not stirred"—and the accompanying implication that he can tell the difference - Confirmed. A taste test (accompanied by an expert wine taster) resulted in the whole team getting it right. One is more diluted. As to why he would be so insistent, despite claims that stirred is "better" (see The West Wing's Take That! to Bond): "Shaken" is believed to contain antioxidants.

Jill Masterson is killed by having her body painted entirely gold, thereby causing her to suffocate through the skin (this was an actual belief at the time, and the movie's makeup people were afraid they'd kill the actress if they didn't leave an unpainted patch) - Busted. Even if your skin can't breathe, regular breathing still works fine. Jamie displayed some bizarre symptoms, though, earning the myth a "Plausible" until they retested it with Adam. (As a side note, they also tackled the myth that the actress really was killed doing this, which they easily busted by having her appear on-camera.)

Oddjob decapitates a statue with a razor-edged hat - Busted for the movie portrayal. The hat could decapitate a statue if it were hollow or made of unreinforced plaster, but the statues in the movie weren't.

Bond has a magnet in his watch that he guesses could deflect bullets - Busted. Magnets could deflect a bullet, but you'd need around a dozen supermagnet bricks to pull the bullet even a little bit off its trajectory. A dinky little wristwatch-sized one wouldn't cut it.

The speedboat jump - Plausible. The MythBusters' boat overturned in the air thanks to not meeting the ramp quite right, but the boat was in good enough condition afterwards that it's reasonable that it could happen. Worth noting that it took the stunt crew eighteen takes to successfully perform the jump.

Moonraker: Jaws uses his metal teeth to bite through a steel cable - Busted. Even with various improvements over the movie version, such as sharpening the teeth and drastically increasing the bite strength, the Busters got nowhere close to biting all the way through a cable.

Goldeneye: Q develops an exploding pen that blows a test dummy in half - Busted. Don't get us wrong, a rigged pen could take a good chunk out of your torso, and would definitely kill you if placed in the pocket next to your heart, but there's just not enough space in a pen to pack enough explosive to blow someone all the way in half. They ended up using a jumbo novelty pen.

Die Another Day: Bond rights his flipped car by firing the Ejection Seat - Busted. The seat's thrust as shown in the movie wouldn't have enough force to flip the car, and its exhaust has the potential to set the interior on fire.

Casino Royale (2006): Bond escapes bad guys by shooting a propane tank and making it explode - Busted. Bond's Walther P99 couldn't penetrate a tank, and even with bigger guns it just released a gas cloud rather than exploding. Even tracer rounds couldn't ignite the propane; they had to use incendiaries.

A great white shark at ramming speed can wreck a dive cage or punch a hole in a boat - both Confirmed.

A great white shark can drag and hold barrels underwater: Plausible for pulling them down; Busted for keeping them there.

A great white shark can pull a boat backwards fast enough to get waves crashing over the stern - Busted. Sharks don't have enough force to do that.

Punching a shark in the face will get it to back off - Plausible.

The shark is killed by shooting a scuba tank wedged in its mouth, causing it to explode - Busted. When the tank was shot, the decompressing air caused it to fly off like a rocket. A later revisit tested some more variations on this scene: Can the rocketing tank kill the shark? - No, it got shoved down the shark's throat but not so far that it couldn't be coughed up again. Would shooting the side of the tank give better results? - Nope, bullets just ricocheted off; even the armor-piercing one.

From a deleted scene, sharks can be caught with special piano wire - Busted. Piano wire isn't strong enough.

Kill Bill: Punching your way out of a buried coffin - Busted. You'd have issues breaking the coffin, especially with the lack of room to maneuver, and even if you could get through then you'd have to deal with six feet of dirt; all before running out of air.

Kiss the Girls: In a room full of methane, the hero fires a gun without detonating it by shooting through a carton of milk - Busted. First of all, the Busters couldn't get a methane-filled room to explode in the first place; they had to use hydrogen. Once they were actually able to test the milk part, it didn't do anything to smother the muzzle flash.

Surviving a toilet bomb by taking cover in the bathtub - Confirmed. If you have the right kind of bathtub (cast-iron), you could cover your self in a bomb blanket quick enough and the tub could protect you from a bomb. The toilet that the bomb's on, however, will not be launched through the roof.

Using liquid nitrogen to slow the bomb's reaction was not only Confirmed, but more effective than in the film. Pouring liquid nitrogen onto the battery that powered the trigger disabled it until all the LN2 boiled off, 15 minutes later. Forget about hiding in the bathtub; you've got time to hide across the street — or anywhere else, for that matter.

Ironically considering the rest of the scene, the only part of this that was not confirmed to work was sitting on the toilet for twelve hours—the neurologist they called in warned it could cause serious nerve damage.

A car crash launches a surfboard off the top on an SUV and through a windshield, decapitating the henchman in the driver's seat - Busted. A surfboard is made out of relatively lightweight and soft materials, won't fly straight, and even at twice the speed in the movie it won't have enough momentum to break through a windshield, which are specifically designed to resist impacts.

Improvising a bomb and blowing up a wall by putting a gram of sodium into a gelcap and then dropping it into a bottle of water - Busted. Sodium does react violently with water, but not violently enough to even blow the lid off the bottle. Not to mention that the water had to be heated to dissolve the gelcap within a reasonable time. The Busters got flashier results with a) a larger dose of sodium and b) potassium instead, but the wall didn't come down until they used actual explosives.

MythBusters testing has consistently demonstrated that while MacGyver's improvised explosives like the sodium gelatin capsule are all chemically plausible they aren't sufficiently powerful to do any real damage to anything. Word of God from MacGyver's production team is that the more dangerous things Mac pulls off are actually deliberately altered so that fans attempting them in Real Life would not be injured or killed in the attempt.

Improvising an ultralight aircraft in four hours with bamboo, trash bags, and an engine from a cement mixer - Busted. For one thing, the Build Team needed four days to build the thing, not four hours. And even when it was done, it crashed instead of getting airborne.

Blowing out a lock by taking powder from six bullets, stuffing it in the lock followed by a cartridge cap, and setting it off with the butt of a gun - Busted. This fails on multiple points; you can't open bullets with your bare hands, you can't set off bullets with something as broad as a gun butt, and even when successfully set off the door wouldn't open. And as the team confirmed as the very first thing they did, it's a lot easier and more effective to just Shoot Out the Lock.

Rendering a bomb in a mail truck safe by filling the truck full of wet cement to smother the blast - Busted. The cement helped redirect the blast vertically, but not enough to keep the truck and bystanders from being blown apart.

Mission: Impossible: The series' repeated use of Latex Perfection - Plausible. As noted above, it can work as long as there's a distraction to keep attention away from the person in disguise.

Monk: Monk throws a grenade into a fridge to protect himself - Busted. While a fridge will protect you from a grenade in the most pointlessly literal sense, you are now in danger of being killed by a high-velocity chunk-of-fridge.

Mr. Bean: Painting a room by placing an explosive in a paint bucket - Busted. Not only was the room incompletely painted, but it also took shrapnel damage; Adam and Jamie's custom-designed contraptions failed to improve the results.

The Mummy (1999): A tomb is illuminated by a set of mirrors reflecting sunlight - Plausible, "but ridiculous". The principles are sound and reflected sunlight would be enough to see what you're doing, but the sun constantly moves across the sky so the mirrors would continually need readjusting. Adam also brings up that Ragnarök Proofing wouldn't be in effect, so ancient mirrors wouldn't be likely to be in working order right off the bat.

The Phantom: Punching someone and leaving only an imprint of the ring you're wearing - Busted. No degree of punch strength will leave a clear imprint of the ring's image; the test punches ranged from making no mark at all to leaving a mild contusion to caving in the dummy skull completely. (As a side note, the comic acknowledged that it wouldn't work and justified his mark as caused by a reaction from some material on his rings — and this was done decades before the MythBusters tried it.)

Holding a boat upside-down above your head underwater to create an air bubble - Busted. The boat is far too buoyant to hold it underwater without weighing it down.

After running out of normal cannonballs, the characters improvise and start firing anything they can spare (while the MythBusters were testing the real-life practice more than this specific movie, they did use movie footage of shooting silverware to demonstrate) - Busted for the silverware as shown in the movie, which scattered and deformed; bottles of rum and a Seadog Peg Leg similarly shattered and blew apart rather than at the target. Steak knives packed into a sabot and nails did decent damage and were ruled Plausible. But a good sturdy length of chain outdid all the others, nearly tearing the target in half.

Swinging to the cliff face (here simulated with the side of a building) by Adam and Jamie shifting their weight - Busted. Even with four circus performers in the cage with them and the cable shortened by half, they still couldn't pull it off.

Grabbing vines on the cliff's face - Plausible. Rope was used to simulate the vines seen in the film.

Climbing the ravine - Plausible. Climbing the twelve feet to the top of the cliff was a relatively simple feat.

Real Genius: A superlaser is used to pop an enormous amount of popcorn until it breaks out of every opening of the house it's in - Busted. While the laser was an invention of the movie, real-life lasers can be used to pop popcorn. However, popcorn doesn't pop with enough force to break anything.

RED: In a standoff where the hero has a pistol and the villain has a rocket launcher, both shoot at once; the hero's bullet hits the villain's RPG and detonates it, killing her - Busted. A bullet can detonate an armed RPG, but RPGs are armed by inertia and it wouldn't have happened yet at that short distance. Even if it were faulty and armed prematurely, it's much more likely to kill the hero instead of the villain thanks to the rocket directing its blast forward.

Scent of a Woman: A blind man can competently drive a car when a passenger gives him turn-by-turn directions - Confirmed. Jamie and Adam didn't do that great in tests where one drove blindfolded and the other provided directions, but when they directed an actual blind man he did very well; they theorized that someone who had always been blind wouldn't be hampered by preconceptions of how they "should" drive. (That said, they reiterated that having a blind man drive is still dangerous and illegal.) They also tested a scenario where the passenger was drunk, based on a news report, and the result was as bad as if the drunk man was driving himself.

The Score: The method used by Robert De Niro's character Nick to open the safe (cut open a hole on the roof of the safe with a thermal cutter, flood the safe with water, and use a small explosive charge and water expansion to blow the door open) was tried by them. The results: the thermal cutter took longer to cut into the safe than was practical - and would probably incinerate everything within the safe - and the safe would leak profusely (forcing the thief to patch up the door seams, something even the MythBusters couldn't do from the outside), and the explosion would send the door flying away hard enough to become a potentially lethal hazard... but the safe would open as it appears on the film.

Seinfeld: The claim that double-dipping a chip in dip contaminates the dip with your mouth's germs, equivalent to putting the entire bowl of dip into your mouth - Busted. Dipping a chip a second time after dipping and consuming spreads only a few more germs than dipping once, and significantly less than putting one's mouth into the dip. In fact, a completely valid interpretation of the evidence says that any germs added to the dip by double dipping will only be statistical noise compared to the amount of germs already inside the dip and on the chips. Of course, this only applies to bacterial diseases—the jury's still out on spreading viruses.

Shanghai Noon: Breaking out of prison by using a urine-soaked silk shirt to bend the bars - Busted. Pee won't keep the silk from breaking. And also, ew.

A merry-go-round is spun by shooting its railings - Busted. A merry-go-round has too much friction to spin so easily.

Mr. Smith shooting Mr. Hertz with bullets held between his fingers over a fire - Busted. It took far longer in reality for heat to set the bullets off, and once they did the lack of a barrel to contain the gunpowder explosion meant any hit would be nonlethal.

Shrek: Making a functional candle out of earwax - Busted. It takes dozens of people worth of earwax to produce something remotely resembling a candle, and ear wax lacks the properties that allow candle wax to melt and be drawn up a wick, so it quickly fizzles out rather than creating a steadily-burning flame. You wouldn't want to eat a cake attached to it, either.

Bart flushes a lit cherry bomb down a school toilet, causing all the connected stalls to erupt geysers of water - Busted, but not for the reason you might think. A cherry bomb can be ignited underwater and the force would blast out water as shown in the episode - but that force would also blow the toilets right out of the floor. Adam and Jamie ruled that the results didn't match the scene as shown, so it was busted; but Simpsons executive producer Al Jean was present and claimed that Springfield Elementary's toilets were extra-reinforced as a safety precaution.

Homer tries to protect his house from demolition by hanging on to the wrecking ball and cushioning the blow with his body - Plausible. A house wall showed much less damage when a life-sized Homer dummy was attached to the wrecking ball than when it was hit head-on. That said, any potential damage to Homer was left uninvestigated.

The bus jump - Busted. Sorry, no way is that bus going to make that jump. Every test resulted in the bus landing or crashing short of its goal, even when the team tried to hedge their bets by adding a ramp.

Having all the passengers move to one side of the bus as counterbalance to avoid flipping over during a high speed turn was proven to be unnecessary, though the movie characters wouldn't have known that.

Star Trek: The Original Series: The Bamboo Technology cannon Kirk uses against the Gorn - Busted. The improvised black powder was too weak, and even if it weren't the cannon would just blow up from the blast. (Interestingly enough, various writers of Trek Expanded Universe material had long since figured it out, and put in their stories that anybody who had tried the idea in an attempt to ape Kirk had pretty much blown themselves up (or almost did so) as a result).

A New Hope: Luke uses a grappling hook attached to his belt to swing himself and Leia across a Death Star chasm - Plausible, but just barely. Jamie took several tries to land the hook; and found that while using only a belt as support for the swing was adequate, it was also really painful. But take care of both of those and the stunt works fine.

The Empire Strikes Back: To keep Luke from freezing to death while he builds a shelter, Han slices open a just-deceased tauntaun and stuffs Luke inside its internal organs - Plausible. Two and a half hours into the test (the estimated time for Han to build the shelter) Buster's internal temperature had only dropped a few degrees and was still safely out of the danger zone.

Return of the Jedi: An Ewok trap crushes an AT-ST's head between two logs - Plausible. Using an armored car in place of a Chicken Walker, the replica trap did just as much damage as the movie one did. That said, Tory remained skeptical of the fact that the Ewoks were apparently able to predict the height and location of the walker in order to set up the trap accurately. (According to pre-Disney Expanded Universe lore, the trap had originally been built for a native giant Endorian species.)

Titanic (1997): Was Jack's death preventable? - Plausible. First, they showed that having to stay in the water is what caused Jack to succumb to hypothermia. So they attempted to see if both Jack and Rose could use the board Rose was on to stay out of the water. Early attempts showed the board would sink under their combined weight, but they could both float on it if they strapped their life jackets to the board for extra bouyancy. James Cameron's response was to appeal to the Rule of Drama - the story called for Jack to die. Maybe the movie goofed and made the board too big, but Jack could not have lived.

True Lies: A MAC-10 goes off as it falls down stairs - Busted. The gun is specifically designed not to go off that way, as most guns are.

Underworld: Escaping through the floor by shooting the area immediately surrounding you - Busted. Aside from the inherent risk of shooting such a close target, the floor's support beams are far too strong to allow such an escape.

Curving the path of a bullet - Busted. First they tried doing it themselves. Failing that, they tried using a machine. That didn't work either, so they tried unbalancing the bullets (because the bullets in the movie had inscriptions). In the end, they tried to do it by modifying the gun itself. None of it worked; the bullet simply has too much momentum to curve like that.

Fox uses a gun that can fold in half to shoot around corners - Confirmed. The tech for a folding gun exists; no testing needed.

Two cars speed towards each other so one can use the hood of the other as a ramp for a jump - Busted. Two cars heading right towards one another makes a crash, no matter how low the hood of the ramp car is. They then tried attaching an actual ramp to the hood and were able to pull off a jump, but neither car was drivable afterward (and none of this is even touching the part where the jump car is supposed to somersault sideways in midair).

The Wizard of Oz - In a myth concerning production rather than the work itself, the Tin Man's original actor (Buddy Ebsen) was hospitalized from the aluminum dust from part of his stage makeup. The Busters wanted to see if anyone else had a similar reaction - Busted. They used aluminum paste - like what was used with the movie's replacement actor, not the original; inhaling the powder is known to be dangerous - to paint Kari silver, and she was just fine.

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